Tag Archives: writing

Watering the Horse

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“…pain…lots…sometime in the next ten days…without warning…”

The doctor might as well have warned my penis will fall off sometime in the next ten days.  So how does one wait for something that’s possibly more painful—and less productive—than childbirth?  With practice slides down a giant sword into a vat of iodine?  Or nude skydiving through a Saharan sandstorm?  Maybe body surfacing at a dry ice plant in Juneau?  All three?  But in the meanwhile, I have to pee.  I have to pee now and I’ll have to pee again in fifteen minutes.  Except, I really won’t have to pee at all.  My brain says, “Warning, sir!  Your urine reservoir is nearing critical capacity.”  I reply that I peed just fifteen minutes ago, during the last ad.  Then—

“Negative, sir.  It is time to relieve your bladder.”

“Are you kidding?  You can’t say that while the leaders are on the eighteenth green.”

“I am sorry, sir.  If you prefer, it is time to drain the dragon.”

“Dragon?  I appreciate the compliment, but I really can wait.”

“Would you consider leaking the lizard, sir?”

“That’s the same thing.  Leave me alone.”

“I know you are a reasonable man.  How about paying the water bill, sir?”

“Clever, but I’m staying put.”

(Five, four, three, two, one…)

“Damn it!  I’ll be right back.”

“Very good, sir.”

(Fifty-five, fifty-six, fifty-seven…)

“Nothing!  There was nothing!”

“Did you not make the bladder gladder, sir?”

“NO!”

“I am sorry, sir.  My sensors are normally quite reliable.  But do you not think there is still some steam to release from the radiator, sir?”

“There’s some steam, but it’s not in my radiator.”

“I am regretful of your present circumstance, sir.  Perhaps, after the next television ad, you will be able to shake some dew off the lily.”

“What?  Where are you getting this stuff?”

I am sorry, sir.  You left your tablet open.  Shall we change the subject to last night’s French lesson?”

“Lesson?  Uh, sure.”

“Tres bien Monsieur.  Oui oui maintenant?”

“That’s not real French.  Damn it, now I have to go again.”

“To splash the pirate, sir, or to fight the fire?”

“No, to visit the wizard, smart ass.  I know a few of those, too.”

“I am impressed, sir.  I took you as a piddly man.”

“What!?”

“I am sorry, sir.  I was going to say you could point piddly Percy at the porcelain.”

“Screw you.”

“Sir, I am your brain.  You have been screwing with me for a period of decades.  Is this a self-indictment?”

“Screw you twi…  Damn it!  I’ll be right back.”

“Leave no stone unturned, sir.”

 

 

Gavin W Sisk

July, 2016

 

 

Soft Targets

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I have a golf swing I struggle mightily with.  But once in a while I’ll loft a ball softly near a distant pin at the driving range, and someone watching will say to me, “you have a really nice swing.”  I don’t like to look a gift horse in the mouth–but nice?  What’s nice about it?  I have a hundred things going on in my swing, six of which are useful and none repeatable.  During my swing I think a thousand things, and a thousand different things from swing to swing.  Which are the nice things?  Nice on the range but not on the course?  Nice today but not tomorrow?  Nice with a six iron but not with a comma?
That’s what I hate about golf.  Writing too.




July, 2014



The Game

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Visiting Hours

Worked all day and evening.
Haven’t seen her since yesterday.
Trundled into the house, she hugging my heels.
No time for whiskey; She has an appetite.
Order up!
Purrs and paws my pants while I take too long
to scoop her kibbles from the plastic bin.
Now what the hell, you furry fickle?
Two bites and you’re scratching at the door?
You’re spayed! That tom won’t take you.
But I see that the moon will. 

Aug. 13, 2013

When I wrote the above first version of this poem I imitated my daughter’s writing process.  I had an experience, recognized its potential, and immediately wrote it down.  It should be simple.
This process works well for my daughter partly because I’ve taught her to always swing for the fence.  Partly also because I’m careful to stay out of her way, and because there has been less crap in her life to pollute her perceptions.  She mostly throws down the right words on her first try.  If she makes small mistakes, they shouldn’t matter–proper punctuation is for adults.
I am an adult.  Tenderized by middle age, I don’t often swing for the fence.  Hell, my life experiences have made the fence all but invisible.  Instead of exploring my thoughts, I tend to write what I believe I ought to be thinking, or what I hope will seem to others to be good thinking.  So I must approach writing, especially poetry, incrementally.  Instead of baseball, I play golf.
Every poem has a par.  I tee off with a driver (usually hooked behind a handsome tree) and proceed toward a distant hole in fits and fights against my own mysterious nature.  A hole-in-one is theoretically possible but highly improbable.  For me, writing is a game of one damned thing after another–of seeing the light but listening for the tick of the bullshit meter.  Writing is rewriting.  Driver, six iron, wedge, putter—perception, delusion, epiphany, closure (that’s a good hole).  What keeps me playing the game is knowing the woods are full of as many flowers as lost balls.
Here is what may be the finished version of the above poem.  My daughter warned me against fiddling too much with the original.  For me, though, such weightless subjects as cats are opportunities to disregard the bullshit meter.  It’s not Eliot, and that’s fine.


Visiting Hour

Worked all day and evening.
Haven’t seen her since last night.
Trundle into the house, she hugging my heels.
No time for whiskey; Rosie has an appetite.
Purrs and paws my pants while I take too long
to fumble through the cupboard, shuffling beans
and soup and sauce to finally find the fish flakes,
and bend to scoop her kibbles from the bin.
Order up!
Now what the hell, you furry fickle?
Two bites and you’re scratching at the door?
You’re spayed! That tom won’t take you.
But I see that the moon will. 

Aug. 17, 2013

From an Image of Dunbeath

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ROCK POOLS AT DUNBEATH, By Jean Horseman

 

Impended by November’s damp,
I would brace against a rocky shelf.
In oilcloth, beneath an old sowester–
my back to the wind to guard the ember
of a good cigar; a flask of Highland Park
in a felt pouch hanging from my neck;
a surveyor’s notebook in my left hand
and a stub of a pencil in my right–
I would ask no more from the storm
than synaptic sparks to connect
my words and sensibilities,
perhaps mistaking how what rules the
firmament above writes dreams below.

                 G W Sisk
                 Nov. 2012

 

Must My Cat Be My Muse?

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I often start a poem while reclining on my living room couch. The first lines sometimes sit down next to me, like a smart woman wearing a blouse with one unfastened button too many. My nosey cat, Rosie, understands that writing poetry shouldn’t be so easy. She doesn’t wear a blouse, but she understands a lot about buttons.

Rosie

Rosie, I’m trying to write!
While you examine my leg
with unmanicured nails,
and sound my heart with purrs,
you bother my hand with
your head hard as marriage
(yet, warm as your affairs).
I’m arguing with myself,
and fighting presbyopia.
Have what you want!
Must this be all I get:
a wrinkled impression
of the man on the moon
I see at the base of your tail?

G W Sisk

 

June 26, 2011

 

Where Do Ideas Come From?

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I spent years trying to invent interesting things to write about.  I gave up.  It’s a good thing I know how to use a camera.  And anyway, I’m dyslexic.  Lately, though, I can’t seem to avoid encountering interesting things.  I also can’t seem to avoid writing about them, even if I don’t have the time.
Yesterday afternoon I curled into the corner of my couch and started a difficult letter to a friend–difficult because my friend can read between the lines and know when I’m full of crap. This letter was especially difficult to write because two large bees were distracting me with repeated slamming of their heads into the window behind me.  As an appeasement I wrote a quick poem for them.  It worked, but I still had to finish the letter; and I had yet to face writing about two roast pigs I would meet a few hours later.  Those pigs kept me up until three o’clock in the morning.
I used to make fun of people like me.

The End of May

It’s Saturday.
Mowers hum their lines on lawns while
lilacs swing on strings of tender winds.
Two crazy bumble bees fly their heads
into the window pane like spurned lovers.
They break their wings and drop into the
primrose before falling asleep, hungry,
among golden suites of nectar.

G W Sisk
May 28, 2011

How We Start, Again

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I was born, which happens to every animal.  But I was born human.  And what separates us humans from other animals is that we watch the winter bearing down upon us, and then stop to make a note of it.  Some well-provisioned Paleolithic clan, finding themselves with full stomachs and spare time, accepted the imperative to make a note of their precarious life.  They left us the fourteen thousand-year-old paintings in the caves of Lascaux, France.  We’ve been climbing and falling from precipices, and painting and writing about the pain and joy of it, ever since that pre-historic time.

We humans have a unique capacity to feel shockingly lucky to have materialized when we have, inside a human mother’s womb.  What a lucky time and place.  How beautiful we all are.  How God-full are our sunrises.  Yet nearby to each of us are the suffering souls of uncountable humans and other animals, having materialized when they did, inside less lucky wombs.  How God-awful are all those sunsets.  And how grateful the rest of us should feel.  Somehow, though, we find ways to squander our luck.  We fail to accept that our lives are not nearly as complicated as our excuses for not living.

Until recently, I did not appreciate fully my favorite lines from T. S. Elliot’s poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas”.  I’ve always understood the old man’s maudlin complaint as an insincerely constructed lament—a whine-fest with only himself on the guest list.  Now, I have a better idea of what this old man’s blameful situation might mean to us as we age and begin to worry about our misconceptions of life and death.  The issue is not as simple as a mid-life crisis that might be resolved by a new mate and a fast motorcycle.  You might not hear “mermaids singing each to each”.  You might not know what this is, or who is responsible, or where to go next.  But if you sit still and cover yourself in ashes and moan loudly, you’ll incur nobody’s pity but your own.  Then the distain of all who were born in much less lucky wombs will be justified.  Self-pity is like heroin.  It will lull you to sleep while the roads of other lives are laid across your soul.

A man who thinks he knows his thoughts is standing next to a man who knows his own thoughts better.  And neither man may know his own thoughts well enough.  Writing is re-writing.  Re-writing is thinking.  Vision and revision mean coming to grips with what we understand, and what we have misunderstood.  To write, and to re-write, is the opportunity to recover after stumbling.  You learn a little as you fall; you learn much more as you pull yourself back up.  Just as importantly: you may loose your pride on the way down, but you gain your dignity on the way up.

Oct. 16, 2010